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🔗 United States/U.S. Government 🔗 United States 🔗 Biography 🔗 International relations 🔗 Human rights 🔗 Mass surveillance 🔗 Espionage 🔗 United States/North Carolina

Edward Joseph Snowden (born June 21, 1983) is an American whistleblower who copied and leaked highly classified information from the National Security Agency (NSA) in 2013 when he was a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) employee and subcontractor. His disclosures revealed numerous global surveillance programs, many run by the NSA and the Five Eyes Intelligence Alliance with the cooperation of telecommunication companies and European governments, and prompted a cultural discussion about national security and individual privacy.

In 2013, Snowden was hired by an NSA contractor, Booz Allen Hamilton, after previous employment with Dell and the CIA. Snowden says he gradually became disillusioned with the programs with which he was involved and that he tried to raise his ethical concerns through internal channels but was ignored. On May 20, 2013, Snowden flew to Hong Kong after leaving his job at an NSA facility in Hawaii, and in early June he revealed thousands of classified NSA documents to journalists Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras, and Ewen MacAskill. Snowden came to international attention after stories based on the material appeared in The Guardian and The Washington Post. Further disclosures were made by other publications including Der Spiegel and The New York Times.

On June 21, 2013, the United States Department of Justice unsealed charges against Snowden of two counts of violating the Espionage Act of 1917 and theft of government property, following which the Department of State revoked his passport. Two days later, he flew into Moscow's Sheremetyevo Airport, where Russian authorities noted that his U.S. passport had been cancelled, and he was restricted to the airport terminal for over one month. Russia later granted Snowden the right of asylum with an initial visa for residence for one year, and repeated extensions have permitted him to stay at least until 2020. In early 2016, he became the president of the Freedom of the Press Foundation, a San Francisco-based organization that states its purpose is to protect journalists from hacking and government surveillance.

On September 17, 2019, his memoir Permanent Record was published. On the first day of publication, the U.S. Department of Justice filed a civil lawsuit against Snowden over publication of his memoir, alleging he had breached nondisclosure agreements signed with the U.S. federal government. Former The Guardian national security reporter Ewen MacAskill called the civil lawsuit a "huge mistake", noting that the "UK ban of Spycatcher 30 years ago created huge demand". The memoir was listed as no. 1 on Amazon's bestseller list that same day. In an interview with Amy Goodman on Democracy Now! on September 26, 2019, Snowden clarified he considers himself a "whistleblower" as opposed to a "leaker" as he considers "a leaker only distributes information for personal gain".

🔗 Russia 🔗 Russia/mass media in Russia 🔗 Politics 🔗 Media 🔗 Russia/politics and law of Russia

The firehose of falsehood, or firehosing, is a propaganda technique in which a large number of messages are broadcast rapidly, repetitively, and continuously over multiple channels (such as news and social media) without regard for truth or consistency. Since 2014, when it was successfully used by Russia during its annexation of Crimea, this model has been adopted by other governments and political movements around the world.

🔗 United States/U.S. Government 🔗 United States 🔗 International relations 🔗 Law 🔗 Law Enforcement 🔗 United States Public Policy 🔗 Pirate Politics 🔗 International relations/International law 🔗 United States/U.S. Public Policy 🔗 Trade

The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) was a proposed multilateral treaty for the purpose of establishing international standards for intellectual property rights enforcement. The agreement aims to establish an international legal framework for targeting counterfeit goods, generic medicines and copyright infringement on the Internet, and would create a new governing body outside existing forums, such as the World Trade Organization, the World Intellectual Property Organization, and the United Nations.

The agreement was signed in October 2011 by Australia, Canada, Japan, Morocco, New Zealand, Singapore, South Korea, and the United States. In 2012, Mexico, the European Union and 22 countries that are member states of the European Union signed as well. One signatory (Japan) has ratified (formally approved) the agreement, which would come into force in countries that ratified it after ratification by six countries.

Industrial groups with interests in copyright, trademarks and other types of intellectual property said that ACTA was a response to "the increase in global trade of counterfeit goods and pirated copyright protected works". Organizations such as the Motion Picture Association of America and International Trademark Association are understood to have had a significant influence over the ACTA agenda.

Organisations representing citizens and non-governmental interests argued that ACTA could infringe fundamental rights including freedom of expression and privacy. ACTA has also been criticised by Doctors Without Borders for endangering access to medicines in developing countries. The nature of negotiations was criticized as secretive and has excluded non-governmental organization, developing countries and the general public from the agreement's negotiation process and it has been described as policy laundering by critics including the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Entertainment Consumers Association.

The signature of the EU and many of its member states resulted in widespread protests across Europe. European Parliament rapporteur Kader Arif resigned. His replacement, British MEP David Martin, recommended that the Parliament should reject ACTA, stating: "The intended benefits of this international agreement are far outweighed by the potential threats to civil liberties". On 4 July 2012, the European Parliament declined its consent, effectively rejecting it, 478 votes to 39, with 165 abstentions.

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Some of the many ways to read Wikipedia while offline:

• Kiwix: (§ Kiwix) – index of images (2024)
• XOWA: (§ XOWA) – index of images (2015)
• WikiTaxi: § WikiTaxi (for Windows)
• aarddict: § Aard Dictionary / Aard 2
• BzReader: § BzReader and MzReader (for Windows)
• WikiFilter: § WikiFilter
• Wikipedia on rockbox: § Wikiviewer for Rockbox
• Selected Wikipedia articles as a printed document: Help:Printing

Some of them are mobile applications – see "List of Wikipedia mobile applications".

🔗 Economics

Hotelling's law is an observation in economics that in many markets it is rational for producers to make their products as similar as possible. This is also referred to as the principle of minimum differentiation as well as Hotelling's linear city model. The observation was made by Harold Hotelling (1895–1973) in the article "Stability in Competition" in Economic Journal in 1929.

The opposing phenomenon is product differentiation, which is usually considered to be a business advantage if executed properly.

🔗 Ships

A sea anchor (also known as a parachute anchor, drift anchor, drift sock, para-anchor or boat brake) is a device that is streamed from a boat in heavy weather. Its purpose is to stabilize the vessel and to limit progress through the water. Rather than tethering the boat to the seabed with a conventional anchor, a sea anchor provides hydrodynamic drag, thereby acting as a brake. Normally attached to a vessel's bows, a sea anchor can prevent the vessel from turning broadside to the waves and being overwhelmed by them.

Early sea anchors were crude devices, but today most take the form of a marine drogue parachute. These are so efficient that they need a tripping line to collapse the parachute for retrieval. Being made of fabric, a sea parachute may be bagged and easily stowed when not in use.

A similar device to the sea anchor is the much smaller drogue, which is streamed from a vessel's stern in strong winds so as to slow the boat to prevent pitchpoling or broaching in an overtaking sea. The fundamental difference between the sea anchor and the drogue is that the drogue will slow the boat while keeping the heading steady, and is intended to be launched from the stern. The parachute anchor is designed to be launched from the bow and effectively stop the boat's progress relative to the current in an open sea.

🔗 Novels

Siddhartha: An Indian novel (German: Siddhartha: Eine Indische Dichtung; German: [ziˈdaʁta] ) is a 1922 novel by Hermann Hesse that deals with the spiritual journey of self-discovery of a man named Siddhartha during the time of the Gautama Buddha. The book, Hesse's ninth novel, was written in German, in a simple, lyrical style. It was published in the United States in 1951 by New Directions Publishing and became influential during the 1960s. Hesse dedicated the first part of it to the French writer Romain Rolland and the second part to Wilhelm Gundert, his cousin.

The word Siddhartha is made up of two words in the Sanskrit language: siddha (achieved) + artha (what was searched for), which together means "he who has found meaning (of existence)" or "he who has attained his goals". In fact, the Buddha's own name, before his renunciation, was Siddhartha Gautama, prince of Kapilavastu. In this book, the Buddha is referred to as "Gotama".

🔗 Physics 🔗 Spectroscopy

Silicon drift detectors (SDDs) are X-ray radiation detectors used in x-ray spectrometry (XRF and EDS) and electron microscopy. Their chief characteristics compared with other X-ray detectors are:

• high count rates
• comparatively high energy resolution (e.g. 125 eV for Mn Kα wavelength)
• Peltier cooling

🔗 Aviation 🔗 Aviation/aircraft 🔗 Automobiles

The AVE Mizar (named after the star Mizar) was a roadable aircraft built between 1971 and 1973 by Advanced Vehicle Engineers (AVE) of Van Nuys, Los Angeles, California. The company was started by Henry Smolinski and Harold Blake, both graduates of Northrop Institute of Technology's aeronautical engineering school.

🔗 Biography 🔗 Apple Inc.

Jordan K. Hubbard (born April 8, 1963) is an open source software developer, authoring software such as the Ardent Window Manager and various other open source tools and libraries before co-founding the FreeBSD project with Nate Williams and Rodney W. Grimes in 1993, for which he contributed the initial FreeBSD Ports collection, package management system and sysinstall. In July 2001 Hubbard joined Apple Computer in the role of manager of the BSD technology group. In 2005, his title was "Director of UNIX Technology" and in October 2007, Hubbard was promoted to "Director of Engineering of Unix Technologies" at Apple where he remained until June 2013.

On July 15, 2013, he became CTO of iXsystems where he also led the FreeNAS open source project.

On March 24, 2017, he announced his plan to depart from iXsystems and that he would be joining TwoPoreGuys, a Biotechnology company, as VP of Engineering. From January 2019 - April 2020 he was part of the Engineering Leadership team at Uber and, as of April 2020, is currently Sr. Director for GPU Compute SW at NVidia [1].